


if i gave it to you, would you break it?

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Killing Eve Fusion, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-09 08:08:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18634189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: It's just what it says on the tin, folks. First chapter w/Sarah as Villanelle, second chapter w/Sarah as Eve.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> ...because several people requested it on Tumblr.

17.

The idea of Rachel lying in Sarah’s bed shouldn’t be the way it is -- fizzing with something poisonous and fantastic -- but they both feel it sparking up their veins anyways.  _She’s here_ , and  _she came_ , and  _she’s so close_ , and  _if I could just ask her--_

“Y’know,” Sarah says. “You could do some crazy shit, if you wanted to.”

“I don’t want to,” Rachel says. She doesn’t even blink when she says it, like her red mouth could never tell a lie. Her face is so close to Sarah’s face that Sarah’s reflection continues, infinite and dark, into her pupils.

Sarah smiles, fondly. The sharp edge of her incisors. “Liar,” she says.

2.

So Rachel has a file full of Youtube links on her desktop, and those Youtube links are all footage of female assassins, and so she bought herself a set of chef’s knives for her birthday, and so she sometimes spends hours cutting vegetables to perfect slivers--

It doesn’t mean anything. She’s happy. Her desk job. The string of emotionless one night stands with well-endowed men. The one pair of off-brand Louboutins she can never quite bring herself to wear. It’s enough. She’s satisfied. She really is perfectly satisfied.

4.

“You have an admirer,” Siobhan says.

“Seriously?” Sarah says. “Who?”

1.

Sarah is so happy. Sarah could do this for the rest of her life -- the killing, sure, but mostly the becoming. The way she finds a target and slides into their life until they can’t live without her. The way that, eventually, they really can’t live without her: a knife, a gun, a poisoned cup, whatever, it’s not the point, the point is that when it’s over she can throw the wig in a skip and be gone. Sarah can build new lives once a month and then vanish from them and be rewarded for it. She gets paid for it, and she can buy more clothes and makeup palettes and wigs and jewelry and concert tickets and everything she could ever want. 

It’s the one thing she’s ever been good at. 

It’s perfect.

It would just be nicer if someone else appreciated it, that’s all. Siobhan doesn’t give a shit if Sarah learns how to do a pitch-perfect German accent; Siobhan just wants Sarah to get the job done and save up money for, who knows, a GED or something. Some bullshit. Just once Sarah wants to come back to her London apartment and tell someone  _it took this man thirty seconds to invite me back to his home, he didn’t even worry for a minute_. Just so she can hear them say  _oh_ , their voice like praying.

8.

“Oh,” Rachel says. It leaves her mouth in a rush of soft breath.

20.

Rachel’s profile picture on MI6′s website makes her look like an absolute pencil-pusher. She’s wearing a black blazer that’s off the rack; her lipstick is a soft pink-red, forgettable. She isn’t smiling. Her eyes look like spent ammunition, cold and rattling.

10.

The refrigerator, pressed against Rachel’s back, is cold and slick with her sweat. There is a gun barrel stabbing at her temple, which is its own sort of heat.

“Glad I got your sizes right,” Sarah says, conversationally. The gun does not move even one fraction of an inch. 

Sarah says: “The dress looks good on you.”

Rachel doesn’t say anything.

Sarah scoffs, amused, and says: “Don’t do anything stupid, yeah? Hold still.” The weight of the gun barrel leaves Rachel’s head, and then orbits to the other side of her skull. With Sarah’s free right hand she reaches into the pocket of her leather jacket, pulls out a tube of lipstick. She flicks the cap off of it with the pad of her thumb; it hits the floor and rattles, cold. Sarah twists the lipstick out.

“Seriously,” she murmurs, “don’t move,” and the lipstick touches Rachel’s lower lip like the brush of a finger. It strokes lipstick in a curve over the sticky echo of her gloss.

“I hate this shit,” Sarah says. “Lipstick, I mean. Always want to bite it off.” She moves on to Rachel’s upper lip, patient and careful. “Thought it’d look better on you.”

Rachel’s mouth has opened without her say-so, just enough for Sarah to be thorough. “And what if,” she rasps, “I bite down.”

“Hope you do,” Sarah says. Her eyes are white-hot, and the corners of her mouth hold the ghost of a smile. She twists the lipstick back into its tube; she gently pushes the bullet of it between Rachel’s teeth.

6.

On the dancefloor, Sarah shoves her hands up another woman’s skirt. Their bodies are so close they feel like one body -- like the two of them, together, could do anything. Be anything. The neon lights seize and spark like a body tazed.  _Oh,_ breathes the woman into Sarah’s ear,  _oh, oh my god, oh_ \--

“No,” Sarah growls. “Not like that.” She bites at the other woman’s lip until she tastes the bright poppy-red of blood.

14.

Sarah’s apartment is a warm dark cavern, papered with band posters, littered with expensive leather jackets and ripped-up shirts that must cost more than Rachel makes in a week. When Rachel opens the door of the walk-in closet, she finds the only precision in the place: a row of wigs, and under that a row of sealed plastic bins full of tightly rolled-up pieces of clothing. Below that: guns, mostly. Some knives. A hammer.

The apartment smells like men’s cologne and money. If Rachel lived here, she thinks to herself, she would pull the curtains away from the windows. She would trade the black for grey and silver. She would put her knives in the kitchen. She would greet Sarah with the gun she is holding, now, in her hand, and Sarah would say--

8.

“Oh,” Rachel says. It leaves her mouth in a rush of soft breath. She drops the flap of her opened suitcase and reaches in to pull out a perfect pair of Louboutins, glossy as beetles, alive in her hands like a heart.

5.

“This isn’t a game,” Siobhan says, slapping the latest report onto Sarah’s half-asleep face. “Will you stop playing bloody games for  _once?_ ”

“No,” Sarah says. She sits up, grabs the stack of papers before it hits the floor. She reads:  _Rachel Duncan_. She reads:  _pursuing_. She touches her fingertip to the word  _close_.

3.

“All of these deaths,” Rachel says. “They’re all the same woman. She’s -- clever. Unpredictable. Incredibly self-assured.”

“And you’re certain?” says Marion.

“I am,” Rachel says. She curls her fingers into a fist at her side, so she doesn’t reach up and press a hand to her neck -- to feel the way that her heart is thrumming giddily right up against her throat.

16.

When Sarah turns around, slowly, the first thing she sees is the gun in Rachel’s hand. The second thing she sees is Rachel: eyes cold, lips red. She’s wearing the Louboutins.

“Didn’t think MI6 gave guns to its desk jockeys,” Sarah says. “Actually, hold on, I know they don’t.” She pulls her hands out of her pockets and splays them anyways, watching how still Rachel’s finger is on the trigger.

“It’s mine,” Rachel says.

“Why do you have a gun, Rachel?”

The corner of Rachel’s mouth twists up into something grotesque, and at the same time a flash of heat lightning socks Sarah in the stomach. She thinks:  _I want_. She thinks it like a scream.

“Well,” Rachel says. “You never know.” She takes a step closer. Her shoes crunch on all the broken glass.

11.

“It’s a good color for you,” Sarah says conversationally as she takes a step away from the refrigerator -- away from Rachel’s body, pressed to the refrigerator. “Red, I mean. You should wear it more.”

20.

Rachel’s profile picture on MI6′s website makes her look like an absolute pencil-pusher. She’s wearing a black blazer that’s off the rack; her lipstick is a soft pink-red, forgettable. She isn’t smiling. Her eyes look like spent ammunition, cold and rattling.

Sarah clicks the picture anyways, blows it up so Rachel’s eyes fill up the whole screen. She unzips her jeans, wriggles a hand inside, digs her thumb into the stitched-up wound on her right thigh. She hears herself roar; it’s a low wailing sound that echoes off the ceiling and walls. When she lolls her head to the side and meets Rachel’s eyes, she can’t see herself reflected in them at all.

15.

Rachel throws the bottle of champagne across the room. It shatters when it hits the wall.

12.

The man’s body is soaked with blood -- so much so that it dyes his skin red. Someone has smeared blood across his mouth, and -- incongruously -- along the bottoms of his bare feet.

 _It’s a good color for you_ , Sarah murmurs.

9.

“Yeah,” Sarah says, stretching her American accent in her mouth until it snaps and pops like bubblegum. “I’m actually saving up to visit my girlfriend in London.”

“Really?” says the woman she is here to meet. She sounds politely disinterested. She keeps on putting on her lipstick in the bathroom mirror: an ugly plum color, like rotted fruit.

“Really,” Sarah says. “Long distance, you know? It’s not like we’ve, like, met.”

“You must really love her,” says the woman dully, blotting her lips and putting her lipstick back in her bag.

“You know what?” Sarah says. “I think I do.” When the woman is closing the flap of her purse, Sarah stabs the syringe in her neck.

19.

It hurts. Like a mother fucker. “Did you just  _stab_ me?!” Sarah roars. “What the bl-- _ow_ , you bitch!”

The sound comes to Rachel’s brain like it’s from far away and underwater. Her whole mind lives inside the point where the knife breaks the skin of Sarah’s thigh.  _Oh_ , she thinks to herself, the thought like praying.  _Oh_.

She shoves the knife in deeper. Sarah yowls like a cat; her eyes meet Rachel’s, pupils blown all the way out.

“You’re crazy,” Sarah whispers, and then -- somehow -- her mouth lifts into a smile.

7.

She dumps out all the polyester and nylon from the suitcase, layers in better things: thin silk camisoles, dresses with open backs, tailored blazers, lace bras the dark color of dried blood. It was strange, shopping for Rachel -- not strange in a bad way, really, just strange. Sarah crawled into her brain. She could be Rachel, now, if anyone needed her to; not the piles of Rachel lying on the floor, but the Rachel in the suitcase. The Rachel that Rachel could be, if she was pushed just a little bit more.

Sarah zips the suitcase closed and splays her palm on top of it. She thinks about Rachel striding into the MI6 office, the sound of her brand new shoes like gunshots on the floor. The way she’d say Sarah’s name. How she’d put up pictures of Sarah’s brand new death on the board and say:  _dangerous, cunning, unique, clever_. No one’s ever called Sarah clever before. Mostly they call her a psychopath, when they think to call her anything at all. That one isn’t even true. So it’s especially shitty.

Rachel wouldn’t call her a psychopath. The way Rachel’s eyes are, she’s probably been called that too many times. She knows it wouldn’t stick.

Sarah rolls the tube of lipstick around in her hand -- and at the last second, doesn’t put it in the suitcase. She zips the bag up and drums her fingers along it, smiles. She rolls it out the door again.

18.

“I think about you all the time. I think about what you’re wearing and what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with. I think about what friends you have. I think about what you eat before you work, or what shampoo you use. What happened in your family. I think about your eyes, your mouth, what you feel when you kill someone. I think about what you have for breakfast…I want to know  _everything_.”

13.

Rachel gets dressed: her skirt suit, her inherited watch. When she slides the Louboutins on her feet she feels like a ticking bomb.

The lipstick paints her mouth red. Tick, tick--


	2. Chapter 2

“Nice eyepatch,” Sarah says. 

“Isn’t it?” Rachel says. Her voice is the same way Sarah remembers it: posh, colorless. Her face is colorless too in the flickering porch light – except for her mouth, which is a dark dark red. She’s wearing some gauzy collection of black fabric that’s sheer enough to show Sarah the bone curve of Rachel’s wrists. Hot, actually. For whatever that’s worth.

“May I come in?” Rachel says.

Sarah holds the door open; she keeps herself braced against it, lifts one foot to scratch the part of her ankle that’s bared by her sweatpants. Rachel steps just close enough that Sarah can smell her: white flowers, rust. Her chest rises and falls when she breathes. 

Sarah lifts her arm, and Rachel brushes past her into the house. Before Sarah can think too much about it, she closes the door behind them. Then she locks it.

Rachel is eyeing the house again, like she wasn’t already here, like she didn’t say  _it wasn’t what I expected from you_ and Sarah had to choke down the urge to say  _that’s because it’s not me, it’s just Cal, he bought it for me and what was I supposed to do–_ because it’s stupid to confess that much to a serial killer, and also stupid generally. Confessing. Telling people that this isn’t what she wanted, that’s stupid.

In the kitchen, a champagne cork pops.

“Glasses?” Rachel says.

Sarah scoffs a laugh; she walks into the kitchen, pulls a stout cup out of the cabinet, puts it in front of Rachel. Then she goes to the fridge and gets herself a beer. When she hits it against the countertop, the resulting crack sounds like a gunshot.

“How’s the eye,” she says.

Rachel smiles again; her mouth is thin and pinched at the corners. She lifts up the eyepatch and shows Sarah the stitched-up wound underneath. It’s red, like the inside of a heart.  _I did that_ , breathes a young thrilled Sarah from inside of Sarah’s chest.  _I did that, I broke something, no one can fix it anymore_.

“Shit,” she says out loud. She takes a swig of beer. She pretends her heart isn’t thrumming like a switched-on motor.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me,” Rachel says.

“I’m not.”

“Why do you think I’m here?” Rachel lifts the glass to her mouth and drinks from it. She manages to make the cheap Ikea shit look like million-dollar crystal, and Sarah hates her for it in a way that burns like whiskey in her throat. She takes another swig of beer; the fire doesn’t go out. Her chest warms.

“Maybe you missed me,” she says.

“Maybe I did,” Rachel says. She cups the glass in both hands and takes a sly step closer. “Did you?”

“Did I what.”

“Did you miss me, Sarah?”

“Like a knife in my eye,” Sarah says. She pushes her weight off of her kitchen counter and paces around the corner of the table, so that the table and its stupid pine-bough centerpiece and its fizzing champagne bottle are between them. 

“Clever,” Rachel says. “Would you like that?” She keeps pace around the table, moving slow and easy as a deep-sea shark. Sarah continues to circle. She scrapes her fingernails over the table as she passes.

“Nah,” she says. “Why? You want a round two? That shit was nasty enough the first time, no offense. Had bits of your eyeball stuck under my fingernail for days.”

“I’m going to miss your erudite humor,” Rachel says. She sets the cup down on the table and wanders off idly into the kitchen, trailing her fingers against the counters like she’s already ripped them out and replaced them in her head.

“When I’m dead,” Sarah says. “‘Cause you’re here to kill me. ‘Cause you got a contract.”

Rachel hums disinterestedly. Her back is to Sarah. The fire kicks in Sarah’s lungs and burns all through her and she slams the beer on the table, paces after Rachel’s languorous retreat.

“Didn’t you even think about that?” she says. “For a second? Who the hell would want me dead? Or do you just do whatever they tell you to do, ‘cause it gets you so wet to take orders–”

The knifeblock sings a high note as Rachel unsheathes a knife. Sarah doesn’t know what knife it is, because Cal always cooks. It’s not the biggest one. It’s sure as hell not the smallest one either.

In the resulting silence, Rachel turns around. She leans her hip against the counter and presses the tip of the knife to her index finger, rotates it around and around and around. She twitches up her eyebrows.

“I ordered the hit,” Sarah says. She steps closer. Rachel’s hands stutter on the knife and then go back to spinning it, like nothing happened, except it happened – Sarah saw it happen – she’s high with it: the clean rush of adrenaline, like being nineteen again and stoned on anything within arm’s reach. Just like that.

“So that means,” Sarah says, “when you go through the whole bullshit chain of command,” (closer) “I’m the one holding your leash.” (Closer.) “Aren’t I, Rachel.”

Rachel’s face is a stony mask of displeasure. This close Sarah can see where the lipstick has just started to bleed around the edges of her mouth; she lifts her thumb, puts the pad of it to the red smear at the corner of Rachel’s lips.

“Aren’t I,” she says.

Rachel exhales shakily; there’s a shock of cold against Sarah’s stomach, and she realizes that Rachel has pressed the flat of the knifeblade against Sarah’s skin. Under her tank top. It’s freezing.

She lets herself arch into it and says, hoarse: “Go on. You tell me.”

She watches Rachel’s eye roll in its socket like something feral and the fire roars out further, sparks itself against all of Sarah’s bones and sends her skin shaking. “So,” she says. “Brought you here ‘cause I need you to do something for me. You gonna be a good dog? Rachel?”

The knife twists against her stomach and digs in. The blood flowing down Sarah’s stomach feels like the drag of a warm fingertip, past her belly button and down to her hips.

“Or are you gonna kill me,” she whispers. She rubs her thumb along the curve of Rachel’s mouth and teases it against the edge of Rachel’s teeth. “Eh?”

Rachel’s mouth parts; her teeth close, slowly, around the skin right below Sarah’s fingernail. Then they aren’t slow at all. It hurts like a lightning bolt in the dark and Sarah rides it: the pain in her finger, the pain in her stomach. She remembers, again, the way Rachel had howled when Sarah sank that knife into her eye socket. She’d screamed and screamed. Like she was being born.

The ring of it echoes in the corridors of her mind, and she watches Rachel watch her own reflection in Sarah’s eyes. Sarah doesn’t move; Rachel doesn’t move. The memory of the scream goes on and on.

There’s a hoarse unbearable animal sound from Rachel’s throat and then her teeth unclench – her hand shoves forward – Sarah’s back is against the other counter, and Rachel is almost halfway across the room. She stabs the knife viciously into the wood of the kitchen table, so hard that it wobbles in place. Then she’s gone, pacing deeper into the house.

Sarah remembers, suddenly, that she’s supposed to be breathing. She breathes in. She breathes out. She lifts her tank and stares at the blood-slick of her stomach, the scratchy red starburst where the knife had twisted. “Shit,” she whispers to it.

 _Hello_ , says the adrenaline crash, and slams into her like – like – like. Sarah watches her hands shake against the countertop. There’s a red ring of tooth marks in the skin of her thumb, like marks before a surgery. She lifts her hand, slowly, presses the pad of her thumb to her own lower lip. Opens her mouth–

Hears footsteps. Drops her hand. Rachel’s hand closes around Sarah’s upper arm like a vise and drags her to the dining table, shoves her into a chair. “Sit,” she says.

“Ow,” Sarah says, “shit. What the hell, Rachel?”

Rachel’s only answer is her pissy silence. She shoves Sarah’s tank top up to her tits and douses a pad of gauze in rubbing alcohol, slaps it onto Sarah’s stomach.

Sarah shrieks like a cat being boiled alive.

“This is going to hurt,” Rachel says; her face is back to being blankly smug, her voice likewise.

“Piss  _off_ ,” Sarah says. She reaches down to grab the gauze and swab it around, but Rachel’s hand closes back around her wrist. Her other hand lifts to wipe off Sarah’s stomach; it’s tender, which makes fear and nausea and arousal swirl dizzily around Sarah’s belly.

“There were other ways to ask for my help,” Rachel murmurs, all of her attention on the streaks of watered-down blood left on Sarah’s skin. 

“Really? You didn’t exactly give me your number.”

“And what is the problem,” Rachel says, “that requires my particular brand of assistance.”

“I need you to scare the shit out of another assassin.”

Rachel’s hand stills; her eye flicks up curiously to Sarah’s face. “Interesting,” she says, and then looks back down. “You understand that I’ll be charging.”

“S’pose I thought you’d do it out of the goodness of your heart,” Sarah says, and at Rachel’s sour face she says: “Kidding. Yeah, there’s money.”

“Did you beg it off of your husband?” Rachel says lightly. “Did you tell him what you were going to do with it?”

“Government funded,” Sarah says through the dry desert of her mouth. “And you don’t get to talk about my husband.”

Rachel exhales through her nose in a way that conveys, very clearly:  _uh huh, sure_. She drops the wad of bloody gauze on the table and unwinds more from the bundle, wraps up Sarah’s stomach. “I suppose I’m amenable,” she says. “To government-sanctioned torture, that is.”

Sarah unconsciously leans forward and then back again as Rachel dresses the wound. Rachel’s fingers are very quick. If Sarah pressed her thumb, again, to Rachel’s–

“Great,” she says. “There’s a car outside.”

Rachel puts the gauze back in the first aid kit she must have pulled from the bathroom. She closes it with two sharp clicks; there’s a smear of Sarah’s blood on the clasp when she pulls away.

“You were very certain,” she says in her flat voice, “that you would be able to convince me.”

“I’m convincing,” Sarah says.

Rachel lets out a small, noncommittal hum:  _hm_. She gestures to the front door and then lifts her hand, fingers down. “Shall we?”

Sarah stands up and looks down at Rachel. It’s like being on Rachel’s bed again: that sudden realization that Rachel is a collection of breakable parts and Sarah is a collection of parts that can break. Twisting the knife into Rachel’s eye had been so easy. That’s either the best part or the worst part, depending on how she looks at it.

She offers Rachel her hand; Rachel takes it, delicately lifts herself to standing. She tugs Sarah’s tank top back down and fusses with the ends of it – the same way she’d touched Sarah’s countertop. Like she’s already considering renovations.

“Lead the way,” she says. Sarah puts Rachel at her back and takes one step forward, another – tenses – feels nothing. She risks a look behind her and she’s quick enough to see Rachel’s hand dart out and slip the bloodied gauze into her pocket.

“Right,” Sarah says hoarsely, and leads the way. Rachel stays at her back like a knife as she goes.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
